Elegy
. Its burden is the doctrine of the Resurrection, and it breathes a more evangelical spirit than Gray. It begins in gloom, but ends in glory—a glory reflected from the revealed truth of Scripture, which, once believed, seems then to the poet corroborated by those analogies of nature which had previously ministered despair instead of hope—such as the monthly death and resurrection of the moon, and the nightly darkening and morning revelation of the beauties of the landscape. The stanza commencing with "'Tis night," may be called perfectly beautiful; and we shall not soon forget that Dr Thomas Brown never quoted it without tears, and that he quoted it, in tones of deep and tremulous pathos, in the last lecture he ever delivered to his students.
On the whole, Beattie may be ranked beside, or near, Campbell, Collins, Gray, and Akenside. Deficient in thought and passion, in creative power, and copious imagination, he is strong in sentiment, in mild tenderness, and in delicate description of nature. Whatever become of his Essay on Truth, or even of his less elaborate and more pleasing Essays on Music, Imagination, and Dreams, the world can never, at any stage of its advancement, forget to read and admire the
Minstrel
and the
Hermit
, or to cherish the memory of their warm-hearted and sorely-tried author.
We now bid the author of the
Minstrel
farewell! We love to think of him wandering in youth through the black plantations of firs, which border on his birthplace, or climbing grey Garvock Hill, and fixing his dark pensive eyes on the distant white sails, hovering like rare wings over the rounded blue-green German deep, or crossing those dreary moors which lie between Stonehaven and Aberdeen, a solitary pedestrian, in search of learning and distinction, in that noble old city—or teaching his son to "consider the cresses of the garden 'how they grow,'" and to find in them something worth a thousand homilies or elaborate arguments for the being of a God—or taking his last look of the dead body of his last son, Montague, and saying, "Now I have done with the world." He had many of the powers, all the virtues, and scarcely one of the faults generally supposed to be connected with the character, mind, and temperament of a poet.